


A Myriad of Maybes

by fightforyourwrite



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon Universe, F/M, Introspection, POV First Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-24
Updated: 2017-12-24
Packaged: 2019-02-19 20:58:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,141
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13132074
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fightforyourwrite/pseuds/fightforyourwrite
Summary: Nanaba reflects on her time and her relationship with Mike.





	A Myriad of Maybes

**Author's Note:**

> A fic for the SNK Veterans Secret Santa on tumblr, written for minxiebutt. 
> 
> Hope y'all enjoy!

There is complexity to living a life with an ending you can already see.

It makes the days go on with a strange heaviness, something terrible hanging above your head, ready to drop at a moment’s notice.

The worst part about it? It’s inevitable.

It’s inevitable and I know it.

I live knowing that one day it will come. Acknowledging the imminent reality of my incoming end has become a part of my life now. It comes early for people like me.

The fact is that our end comes to us faster, simply because of a choice we made.

But my question is: What can I do about it?

I find myself asking that often.

What can I do? First of all, who am I?

I’m Nanaba, I remind myself. Just Nanaba.

I’m a woman in her thirties, a milestone that I’m beyond lucky to be at.

I didn’t graduate at the top of my training class, but I still made it through.

I’ve made it this far in this certain branch of the military.

I can make my cuts deep. I can fight to my last blade.

I can lead. If there’s no one else around, I can see what needs to be done.

And I can be trusted.

Trust is starting to feel like an undervalued trait. It’s not as useful as being good with a sword, but as of lately, it seems like something worth having.

There are not a lot of trustworthy people left in our world.

Death favours the decent; the ones who aren’t tangled in lies or confined by a tainted heart.

You know what they say about newbies in the Corps?

They say we always come in hopeful, ready to change the world that we live in.

But by the time the first mission ends, that hope is lost. In its place is nothingness, an empty hole where a dream used to be.

Sometimes I ask myself if that was me when I first came in. I can’t remember if I was, every memory of my past starts to feel more clouded as time goes on.

It all feels so far to me. Perhaps in the grand scale of things, it is.

If I really am to live a life as a statistic, then I’ve spent at least a third of my time in the military. That’s quite a bit to spend considering how quickly my end will come.

When compared to other people, that is.

Though still, I’m lucky to have made it this far.

Mike has told me a few things about being a long-runner in this branch. It comes with more than you expect.

There’s loss, there always will be no matter who you are. But our losses are different.

When we’re fresh from training, we hope that everyone we ever knew in our training will stick around simply because we’re used to it. Familiarity builds a kind of comfort to rest in.

Falling out of that familiarity hurts. You care for this person you know, you worry for them out of your own closeness, but then suddenly they’re gone.

Then for a moment, you fall.

You hit the ground hard, it hurts you but your time to grieve is gone. In moments, you have to keep moving or risk getting hurt even more.

Our losses are unfiltered and raw, they hit us at every angle and stay with us.

Sometimes that emptiness inside our hearts remains as it is. It doesn’t get filled with anything.

It just stays and stays until we forget that we’re even alive anymore.

Being alive is a privilege, but time makes it hard to remember it.

When Mike told me that, he said it with a sullen firmness to him that took hold of his entire body.

I remember that day, I was in his office at the time. I can’t even remember why I was there in the first place.

But I was sitting across from him at a barren wooden desk, the one lamp in the room barely keeping things alight.

In that moment, Mike was still, stiller than I had ever seen him before.

He had been in the Corps longer than me. It’s not a stretch to believe that he’s seen a lot of this world.

I remember at the time thinking that I had never seen Mike like that before.

The days where I knew him as the silent man (with that strange sniffing habit) were suddenly gone. In the place of what I knew was someone a lot more fragile, a person left timeworn and vulnerable after all the hell he had seen.

Mike Zacharius had always been a peculiar person to me. There’s something about knowing him better that makes me want to be with him longer, as short as out time in this world is.

Some feelings are inescapable.

At one point in my career in the Corps, I finally registered that the only way to feel less for a person when they went was to never affiliate myself with them at all.

Closeness was a crutch, once it was gone I would fall hard.

Falling is painful, it’s terrifying.

But in the scope of our whole world, is it truly the most frightening thing any of us will ever face?

Is it?

As horrible as this world is, something manages to stay with us. It’s a lingering feeling that stays inside of our hearts. Perhaps an echo of dreams once stolen.

Maybe it’s hope. Maybe it’s curiosity. Maybe it’s something else entirely.

Maybe I care about Mike a lot, maybe I like to listen to what he says, maybe I like it when he does the same with me.

Maybe I like the colour of his eyes and maybe I smile when he tells me that he likes the scent of my hair.

Maybe I wish we had more time, maybe I wonder how our lives would be in a different world.

Here I am in a myriad of maybes, wondering about what I could do in the world I’ve been born into.

Human beings are strange, no matter what walk from life we come from. We live every day knowing that the end will come eventually.

For some, the end is far, something they don’t even think about until they’re closer to that point.

But for me, for Mike, for everyone else who I’ve become familiar with, our end is closer. We saw it the day we chose to wear the wings of freedom on our backs.

But yet we live on.

In a miraculous twist of fate in a world filled with horror, we choose to live.

It’s in our nature, not as soldiers but as human beings.

Maybe it’s not about our beginnings or our ends, but the time we have in between.


End file.
